


all the king's horses

by glitteringconstellations



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [6]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Fingore, Gen, Horror, Kinda Character Death?, Mouth Sewn Shut, Mutilation, Voodoo, Voodoo doll, i guess it could be implied, not really??, oh boy what NOT to tag, uh proceed at your own risk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 02:57:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17417723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteringconstellations/pseuds/glitteringconstellations
Summary: It wasn’t the blade sinking into the flesh of his palm, nor the smell of wood smoke and incense permeating the air that woke Keith. Nor was it the weight of iron-wrought shackles hanging heavy from his wrists and ankles.No, it was the sinister giggle in his ear and frigid fingers carding through his head that roused Keith from a dead slumber. He didn’t remember going to sleep at all—in fact, he wasn’t so sure he’d been asleep so much as knocked out. His head ached with a throbbing pulse and he couldn’t quite bring the world into focus. The room was dark, shadows dancing along the dingy wall certainly not helping things. A groan escaped him despite himself."Don't worry, it'll only hurt for a bit."





	all the king's horses

**Author's Note:**

> "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put keith back together again" 
> 
> yeh i'm horrible so what else is new? bad things happen bingo prompt: mouth sewn shut with keith (as requested by not one but TWO anons). i don't know what else to say except: i'm sORRY. maybe he'll live in the next one? who knows. this isn't proofread, bee tee dubs. it's 3:30 am and i need to sleep. clearly.
> 
> (i was listening to barbie girl on repeat while i wrote this because of the whole doll vibe and also because i really needed the levity so if it helps you to play barbie doll while you read you will get no judgement from me.)

It wasn’t the blade sinking into the flesh of his palm, nor the smell of wood smoke and incense permeating the air that woke Keith. Nor was it the weight of iron-wrought shackles hanging heavy from his wrists and ankles, nor the orange light of a flickering torch in a sconce on the wall overhead, nor the chill permeating him through every inch of exposed skin pressed against the stone floor. 

No, it was the sinister giggle in his ear and frigid fingers carding through his head that roused Keith from a dead slumber. He didn’t remember going to sleep at all—in fact, he wasn’t so sure he’d been asleep so much as knocked out. His head ached with a throbbing pulse and he couldn’t quite bring the world into focus. The room was dark, shadows dancing along the dingy wall certainly not helping things. A groan escaped him despite himself.

“About time you woke up, sleepyhead.” 

The icy fingers pressed something soft into his bleeding hand and gently forced his fingers closed around it. Keith let his head loll to the side to get a closer look. Belatedly, he registered that, _ow_ , yeah, his hand hurt, why did his hand hurt? 

“Don’t worry, it’ll only hurt for a bit.”

Keith took a deep breath and, with tremendous effort, forced himself to lift his head. What was going _on_? He racked his brain for the last thing he remembered, for some context as to why he lay chained to the floor, filing through them one by one. The relief efforts in the wake of the ten thousand year war, landing on the planet Sastrilia, helping the people of the village Muniri, their warnings of the evil that, they explained, was behind the disappearance of no less than seven of their number…

An evil that, apparently, took the form of a little girl. 

He almost couldn’t believe his eyes. The girl looked no older than maybe eight or nine years old by human reckoning and not so different in shape. Her ears tapered off into a point, though, and she sported sallow grey skin. Perhaps the most disconcerting part of her, besides the admittedly terrifying grin she sported which showed off a row of sharp fangs, were her eyes, black sclera and piercing, blood-red irises that peered down at him from behind her long black tresses. 

“What…” His voice came out cracked and warbled, and he coughed to clear it. “What did you do to me?” 

“Oh, nothing much,” the girl said. She stifled a giggle behind her hand. “Just having some fun with my new dolly.” 

It registered to Keith, then, that he was still clutching on to something with his injured hand. His head plopped back down to the floor with a painful thump, and he found he couldn’t lift his hand to examine the object, so again he let his head fall to look down at it. 

The object was, in fact, a doll, though it was so vaguely human-like in shape and color Keith wouldn’t have guessed it at first glance. It looked like it might have been made of burlap or something similar, eyes made of buttons and a mouth only drawn on in a crooked line. Keith’s blood stained the body of it, and a lock of soft black hair had been haphazardly sewn onto the top of its head…

It took a solid ten seconds for Keith to realize the hair sewn to it was his own, and he dropped the doll with a startled cry. 

The girl giggled again and retrieved the doll from where Keith dropped it. “That wasn’t very nice of you. You shouldn’t throw things that don’t belong to you on the ground like that.” Her hands glowed faintly where she clutched the doll to her chest. Keith couldn’t even begin to fathom what that meant. His mind raced through all the ways he could escape. 

Panicked eyes flittered around the room. It was completely empty save for the shackles that bound him to the floor, and no windows lined the walls. Blessedly, it seemed the girl was so confident in her magic that she’d left the cell door open. 

There was no other option—he’d have to make a break for it. 

The longer he waited, the more strength he gathered. He still felt drained, like something had siphoned all the energy from him all at once, but it was enough. It would have to be.

“Let me out of these,” Keith said. He jerked at the chains with his wrists, a growl of frustration slipping out of him when they didn’t so much as budge as jangle uselessly. The girl seemed amused at his struggles. 

“You’re quite rude, you know.” Keith leveled a glare at her. It did jack all, because she just kept smiling that unnerving smile. “Would it kill you to say please?” 

Keith grit his teeth. “ _Please_ let me go.” 

The girl beamed down at him. “Only if you promise to stay and play with me!” 

_Oh, I’ll play with you all right_ , Keith thought viciously. There was no fooling him now, no matter how disarming her demeanor might have been—this girl was not what she appeared. He’d come across much stranger things during his time in space; aliens who never appeared to age, aliens that didn’t feel pain. Actual space witches with actual space magic. He’d be a fool to take her at face value. “Sure, whatever.”

“You have to promise!” 

Annoyance bubbled under his skin and it took him every ounce of restraint not to actually snarl at her. “I promise.” 

The giggle that followed sent chills down Keith’s spine. For a moment, he wondered if he’d done the right thing making such a promise, if she was just going to ignore it either way. The glow at her hands pulsed once, twice, before it faded into the darkness of the cell, leaving only the flickering torchlight. Then the girl procured a set of keys from her pocket, and Keith released a sigh of breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. 

She took her sweet time releasing him from his shackles, starting first with his ankles and moving up to his hands. With every clank of iron hitting the stone, Keith felt a buzz of energy flowing up and down his extremities. It wouldn’t have surprised him if there were something magically binding in those cuffs. Still, he could move his limbs again, a feeling he would not take for granted. 

The girl paused at the last cuff, her lips never once turning downward to a frown. She leaned down close, nearly nose to nose with Keith. “Remember, you promised,” she said. Then she turned the key in the lock, and the last cuff came off. 

Immediately, Keith said, “I lied.” 

Without wasting a second breath, he reared back and head butted the girl in the face with all the force he could muster. She cried out, the doll falling from her free hand in shock as Keith scrambled to his feet and bolted for the door. His arms and legs still buzzed like he’d touched an electrical socket, but he pushed it far back to the recesses of his mind. He had more pressing matters at hand. Like getting the hell out of here. 

There was no discerning which way lead out and which way led deeper into… wherever the hell he was. Pure adrenaline kept him on his feet and moving forward through his stumbles, and instinct alone told him where to go. Left, left, right… the corridors all looked the same. 

_Out, out, just get out._

At last, he burst into what looked to be a crossroads of the branching corridors and nearly sank to his knees in relief, because there along the far wall was a staircase. His out, his escape! In long strides he crossed the room and he dared to think that this was it, this was just another close call that Lance would make fun of him for, that he could laugh over later—

Keith screeched to a dead halt before he even lifted a foot to take the first step up the stairs.

_What…?_

He tried to move his leg, but it wouldn’t budge. Same with his arms. He couldn’t even so much as blink. His breath came quicker in panicked heaves as he tried to no avail to get to those stairs. Freedom was right there! What was happening? _Why can’t I move?!_

A tutting sound echoed into the room from one of the many branching corridors. Keith’s heart sped up, thrumming painfully in his chest. 

“Silly boy… I have to give you credit, that’s the furthest any of my dolls have gotten.” 

The girl sauntered into the room almost casually, angling herself so that Keith could see her from his prone position. Gone was the innocent grin on her face, replaced with something much more predatory. Her face didn’t even look disheveled—Keith was certain he’d broken her nose, at least. 

In one hand was that doll again, which she inspected lazily. She addressed the doll instead of Keith directly. “But you know… you made me a promise.” Keith couldn’t even move his mouth to retort. “I don’t like it when people break their promises.” 

It was then that Keith noticed the object in her other hand—a long, slender knife that tapered down from a rounded pommel to a razor sharp point. In lieu of a hilt, it had a decorative ornament on the blunt end, an ornament that looked eerily similar to a human skull. If Keith had full control of faculties, he would have shivered. 

“Lucky for me,” the girl went on, still gazing down at the doll in her hand, “you made that promise in blood. Willing or not, a promise is a promise.” 

She finally turned those wicked red eyes on Keith at the same time she raised the blade high above her head. They flashed in the torchlight, and at the same time she brought the blade down, whatever magic that held Keith captive released him. 

The dagger plunged into the gut of the doll. Keith doubled over, choking on an aborted shout as a searing, white-hot pain blossomed through his stomach. 

His ears rung with a high-pitched whine that he only belatedly realized was coming from him. The pain flared as the girl stabbed him again in the same place, giggling in delight as Keith gasped and writhed in excruciating pain on the floor before her. He curled up, hands pressed tight to his stomach and his forehead pressed hard against his knees. A dampness began to seep into the fabric of his flight suit, hot and tacky.

Peeking up through sweaty bangs from his fetal position on the floor, he saw the girl standing over him with the doll. She’d torn a long slit in it, the stuffing spilling out from between the splintered seams. It took a long, horrifying moment, the pain dimming just a hair, for him to realize what that meant. 

Slowly, _slowly_ unfurling himself, he peeled trembling hands away from where he’d clamped them tight to his gullet. Mimicking the split in the doll was a cavernous incision down the front of his torso, from just below his breastbone down to his navel. Blood gushed out in spurts. Keith retched at the sight of it, sending more pain radiating through his every nerve. 

“Let’s see… how about the feet next, for trying to run?” 

Try though he might, Keith just couldn’t summon the energy to even scoot himself away from her. The searing pain lanced up his left leg first and he couldn’t stifle the gut-wrenching scream that tore from his throat. He blindly scrabbled at his knee, the closest part of him he could reach without further irritating the wound down his front. Blood quickly pooled at his foot where it spasmed in agony, pumping out of him with every heartbeat. Keith had no time to collect himself before his right foot met the same fate, as though the girl had stabbed her knife directly through the arch of his foot and not into her doll. 

Keith could admit he’d been in some pretty painful situations. Pretty much any encounter with Zarkon’s forces usually ended up with him getting banged up, more the worse for wear. A couple of those run-ins warranted a trip to the cryopods, a few more than he would have liked. But even the many and varied wounds he suffered during his Marmora initiation paled in comparison to the repeated torment of literally being torn to shreds. 

Next came Keith’s calves, and he was certain not even the longest trip to the cryopod would ever restore full use of the tendons there. The knife cut clean through them, fiery pain like magma suddenly stopping at the knee as Keith lost all feeling below them. Tears streamed down his face and his throat was raw from incessant screaming. The girl flayed his palms open, dug the blade under each and every fingernail. She carved patterns into the expanse of his back and down his hips, occasionally stabbing an inch deep or so just because she could. Cool metal danced over the front and back of his neck, though it did little more than prick just hard enough there to draw droplets of blood here and there. By that point, Keith might have preferred her slitting his throat to this, just to be done with it. 

Just when he thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, he felt the tip of the blade tracing circles up his face, felt it trace the outline of the scar there on his cheek. Finally it came to a stop on his cheekbone, just below his right eye. It tapped there a few times, lightly, pensively. 

Keith’s heart rabbited in his chest. _Oh no._

“I think we’re just about finished now. Just one more thing… You won’t be needing these anymore.”

Pain exploded behind his eye as the blade bit in. Keith _howled_ a wretched cry, weeping tears and blood as his hands pressed desperately against the tortured eye. Clenching his eyes shut hurt even worse but it felt like a claw was digging at him from the inside. The only thing worse than the agony was the dread knowing that the other one would follow suit. 

And it did. 

Over the sound of his own inhuman howls, Keith didn’t hear the soft clatter of buttons dropping to the stone floor. He pressed the backs of his palms against the destroyed sockets as he wept, literally and figuratively blinded by the pain. He didn’t hear the soft clack of kitten heels stepping closer to stand over him as exhaustion and blood loss slowly won over. 

“If only you’d kept your promise,” she sighed, feigning pity. 

Keith had no strength left to answer her. 

“Now look what you made me do to my new dolly. So many holes already.” She tutted again in disdain—it was the first sign of displeasure she’d shown the whole time. It was only when he felt the whoosh of her skirts against his mutilated skin that Keith realized just how close she was. 

“Luckily for you… I’m very good at patching up my toys. But hmm… which hole to start with?”

Frigid fingers traced the outline of his lips. Keith flinched away from her touch, reduced to little more than a whimpering mess. 

“Let’s start with this one… You are quite loud for a dolly, after all.”

\--- 

The intel was solid. 

That didn’t make Lance feel any better about the whole damned thing. 

Dense fog, crumbling monuments, the smell of rotting leaves that squelched in the mud underfoot… this place had all the feel of a set straight out of a George Romero flick, and he hated it. Hated that he couldn’t see two feet in front of his face, hated the unsettling silence that hung over him. 

Hated that he was almost a hundred percent certain that Keith was… _somewhere_ out here in the woods near the Muniri village. No wonder they abandoned whatever settlement they’d once made in these trees—the place was creepy as hell.

A glance down at the tracker—one reverse-engineered by Pidge and Hunk to track the blood signature Keith shared with Krolia, who’d given a sample before they’d even had to ask—told him Keith was within a five-hundred meter radius of him. Which told him jack all, considering he still couldn’t _see_. He’d been blindly following the tracker for at least an hour now, and the third time he’d passed that stupid, squinting, one-eyed gargoyle he’d scratched an ‘L’ in it, just to be sure he wasn’t going crazy. 

He wasn’t. Just going in circles. The gargoyle seemed to judge him for it.

Biting back a groan of frustration, Lance resorted to Plan Z. 

“Keith!” he hissed. “Keith, you there?” 

Silence. He waited, giving Keith a chance to respond, but got nothing in response. A lump settled in the back of his throat. There weren’t many reasons a blood signature target would ping with no verbal response from said target, and none of those reasons were good ones. Lance shook his head vigorously. Nope, he wouldn’t go down that road. Keith was _fine._ He refused to even entertain the thought. 

Settling for following the tracker again, Lance came to a low-rising garden type wall he’d passed a ways back. An idea hit him. Every time he’d gone _around_ the wall he’d end back up at Squinty McGee. But if he went _over_ the wall… it didn’t make sense, but nothing about this situation made sense. 

And so Lance found himself vaulting over the wall with a little grunt, the tracker tucked under his chin. 

The difference was immediate. Although the fog didn’t lift entirely, it cleared enough to reveal a clearing of sorts. The trees clumped together closest to where he stood and thinned out, a narrow path evident through the underbrush. That unsettling silence pressed in around him from all sides. 

The tracker chirped, and pointed down the path of trees. Lance gulped. This was the part in the Romero flicks where he would scream for the hero to turn back. 

Lance didn’t turn back. 

“Keith?” he called again, head swiveling nervously as he pressed forward “Come on man. Give me something to go off of here.”

A shuffling in the shadows off to his left might not have been so apparent to Lance were it not for the deafening silence. He jerked to a stop. 

“Keith?”

Another shuffling flittered from the trees, this time from his right. Lance whirled around to peer into the darkness. 

Lance’s voice grew in his irritation. “This isn’t funny, Keith. Say something!” 

The shuffling stopped, leaving only more of that silence in its wake. Lance hurried forward, both not wanting to let the trail go cold and definitely _not_ wanting to stick around for whatever was hiding in those trees. 

Eventually the trees opened out into a wider clearing, lined with more of those crumbling stones. Only these crumbling stones had inscriptions carved into them, and were placed methodically with aisles and plots. 

Of course Lance would stumble upon an abandoned cemetary. 

He had half a mind to turn back, and was halfway to listening to that half of his mind, when he stopped and actually _looked_. And desperately wished he hadn’t. 

Strewn about the graveyard were a number of bodies, discarded almost carelessly like a child might her toy when distracted. Bile burned the back of Lance’s throat as he cautiously approached the closest one to him. One of the villagers, he presumed from the fluffy ears and owl-like beak. They lay sprawled over one of the stones, feathered arms spread eagle like they were reaching for the sky. Peering closer, Lance noticed a number of wounds on the poor creature, haphazardly stitched or stapled shut. He shuddered, and let his eyes slide to the tracker in his hand. 

Lance’s stomach churned—Keith was here, somewhere, according to this. 

Trepidly, he set about walking through the maze of corpses looking for his friend. Each one was more mutilated than the rest, some thoroughly de-feathered, others with entire limbs missing or hastily reattached. The whole thing made Lance simultaneously nauseous, grief-stricken, and outraged. None of them deserved this fate.

He forced himself to investigate every corpse. He memorized as many details as he could, hoping to provide some closure to the villagers when he went back. With every upturned face that wasn't Keith, he found it harder to quash the hope that maybe the tracker was off. Maybe Keith wasn't here after all. Hunk and Pidge wouldn't be happy to know their tech was bust, and Keith would still be missing, but he'd take that over the alternative.

He saw the feet before the face. Mangled, mutilated feet, clad in a mangled, mutilated dark purple boot, attached to a mangled, mutilated dark flightsuit. Lance's breath picked up and he forced a shuddering sigh, stifling the sob. No. It couldn't be Keith. It just _couldn't_ be Keith. He refused to believe it until he saw the face. The expressionless mask the Marmora favored was cold beneath his fingertips as he felt for the button to disengage.

"Oh God. Oh... oh please, no."

It was Keith.

Lance’s hands flew up to his mouth, and he barely had time to make for the trees before his stomach finally gave out and he heaved. Tears burned his eyes as he clung to the nearest tree, shaking and sobbing. 

Keith’s eyes and mouth were stitched shut.

The stitches were uneven, caked with dried blood, and skin around his lips and eyelids were torn from tugging against the unyielding cord—Keith had been alive, had been _awake_ , had fought the whole time it was being done. 

Only once Lance was sure he could stand on shaky but otherwise steady feet did he brace himself to go back to Keith’s side. Other lacerations marred Keith just about everywhere, and—perhaps worst of all—the fabric of his decimated flightsuit had been sewn _into_ the skin where the cuts were sealed up. What skin wasn’t stained with blood was a stark, gray pallor, and Lance guessed if the shock of the brutality hadn’t killed him, then the blood loss would have. 

He reached a trembling hand out to grasp Keith’s ungloved, mangled one, and he flinched at how cold it was. Gingerly, he traced mindless circles into the back of his palm, one of the very few uninjured places on him. Tears of grief and fury sprung anew to his eyes.

“Oh, Keith… What did this to you?” 

How long he sat there clinging to Keith’s cold, dead hand, he wasn’t sure. Long enough to collect himself, at least. With a heavy heart, he stood and scrubbed viciously at his eyes. He took a deep breath, reached for the button that activated his comm, and faltered.

_What am I going to tell the team?_

A giggle echoed from the trees behind him. 

Lance whipped around on his heel, his blaster in his hands before he could really think about it. “Who’s there?!” he shouted, fury simmering just below the boiling point under his skin. 

The giggle turned into full-on laughter, bouncing from the canopies and ringing through the clearing. Lance’s hackles raised as he spun around in circles, trying to pinpoint the source of the laughter. He shot his blaster into the trees a few times. The quintessence lit up the darkness for a split second before fading, but revealed nothing. Lance snarled in sorrowful rage, blinking through his tears. 

“Show yourself, you coward!” 

There was movement behind him—Lance saw it out of his peripheral—followed by a drawn-out, gutteral groan. A _familiar_ voice made that groan. Lance froze, ice shooting through his veins.

Slowly, he turned. 

He wasn’t going crazy. Keith _had_ made that noise. But… but that couldn’t be possible. Keith was dead. 

Wasn’t he? 

Lance’s eyes went wide as Keith’s limbs jerked. Air left him in a rush as Keith rose, all at once boneless and stiff. First one arm, then the other, rising first at the hip, then at the chest, like he were being pulled to his feet by a string. His head lolled down as he finally came to a stop standing upright, chin and wrists hanging limply. It reminded Lance of a macabre marionette.

“Look, everyone, a new dolly has come to play!” 

Lance didn’t even care at this point to figure out where the voice was coming from. One by one the corpses rose around him. Lance was _petrified_ , his weapon slipping from stiff fingers as his mouth hung open in a soundless shriek. He took a tremulous step back, another, then tripped on a gravestone and landed flat on his bottom.

"K-Keith...?"

Keith’s head snapped up, and he lunged.


End file.
